


Perhaps by Divine Intervention

by clear_sight



Category: Original Work
Genre: Except not really., Fantasy, I basically treated Catholicism like legos., I just wanted to write them something., I'm pretty sure no one on the planet actually understands how Catholicism works., Not that it really applies to this anyway., So they would shut up., Sorry guys, These guys are from an unfinished novel., Urban Fantasy, extremely loosely, loosely based on religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 11:15:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20947418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clear_sight/pseuds/clear_sight
Summary: Moving on with one's life is always hard.  But it's also necessary.





	Perhaps by Divine Intervention

At last, the twins were in bed. They’d cried the whole evening, because the house was unfamiliar and the landscape around it wasn’t what they were used to. They missed the mountains all around them, the parish house that had been their first home, the graveyard where they used to play, and they missed the people of Sugar Gap. It had been hard on them, relocating to Europe. It had been hard on them all. 

Eastern Europe was both strange and eerily familiar to Kristóf and just strangely distant to Belial. They had decided to move to Kristóf’s home country, but not his home region. Even before they had moved, they had known it would be difficult. Kristóf had at least some vague idea of what people could be like with people like him. Like Mark and Mary. Rephaim. Part-demons. Belial, as a nephilim, may not face quite so much fear, but he still felt the weight of people’s stares. Kristóf worried, at times, what this might mean for the children he had adopted nearly eight years ago. He was fiercely protective of them.

If one had asked him four years ago whether he would ever consider leaving Sugar Gap, he would have said no. But he had left his parish in the very capable hands of now-Father Marcus and Sarah, who was now a doctor. Little Sarah, who Kristóf had delivered himself. Marcus had been born in a hospital, but Sarah had come suddenly in the middle of night, and the roads had been too hazardous to try to get down the mountain to the nearest hospital. When she had begun medical school, Kristóf had given her a book of all the things he had learned over the years outside of med school. He knew that the two of them would take good care of the community and felt comfortable leaving his people in their hands.

For Belial, this was the first time since he was four years old that he had lived anywhere outside of his monastery in Jerusalem for more than a few months at a time. It helped, having Kristóf and the twins with him. Kristóf had been his pillar of stability through all things since they were children. Despite growing up on opposite sides of the world, despite initially speaking different languages, despite the reason they had been thrust into a partnership they had no say in, Belail had come to love Kristóf. In a way he didn’t really understand. It was more than just a friend and different than a brother, but those were - to his mind - the only real options as far as that went. There wasn’t really a question as to whether or not Belial would trust Kristóf with his life, no whether Kristóf would do the same. They had done so too many times to count by now. It was usually the two of them the Defense sent into the most dangerous situations, because of what they were. A better measure of Kristóf’s trust in Belial, though, was the fact that he trusted the nephilim with his children.

Now the pair sat side by side in front of the fireplace of the small house the four shared; Kristóf, Belial, Mary, and Mark. It had been a relatively quiet evening. The twins had protested everything, as had been the norm since they had moved here, but that didn’t count as anything worth considering the evening one of unrest. They were children. They didn’t fully understand why their father and their Uncle Lial had pulled them away from everything they had known and moved them here. Kristóf was just glad he had decided to teach them Romanian alongside the English they learned from the Sugar Gap residents and the Italian they learned from Father Agnelli, who had been a father to Kristóf and was a grandfather to them. They had learned several languages from Belial as well.

This far out into the middle of nowhere, the fire wasn’t anything special. It was what heated the house. The chimney rose out of the middle of the roof, bringing warmth to the whole house. The opening on the other side, as the hearth was double sided, opened into the kitchen and was part of cooking. The two bedrooms were to one side of the house, the kitchen and living space to the other. It really wasn’t too different from the parish house in Sugar Gap, except that the parish house had been updated to include gas heating and central air and an indoor bathroom had been added. There had been a small room with a tub added off the kitchen in this house, though there was no indoor toilet. Their water came from a well, so there was no bathroom sink. It wasn’t really so different from the way Belial’s people lived. He had been to the village where he had been born several times over the years. It had helped him to make peace with his family’s decision to send him away when he was a child. Kristóf had never returned to the town where he was born and had no idea who his parents had been. At this point in his life, he was content with that. He had made his peace.

“Did we make the right choice?” Kristóf asked quietly for the seventh time that week.

“We went where we were needed,” Belial answered, just had he had the other six times.

He knew why Kristóf was asking. The children. Like clockwork, every night, about ten minutes after he finally got them to sleep, he would ask Belial that question. And every night, Belial would give him the same answer. It was easier for him, he knew. He hadn’t had the same sort of ties to the monastery that Kristóf had had to Sugar Gap. But Belial knew the rephim had left his community in good and steady hands. Neither of the roles Kristóf had filled - as both the town priest and the town doctor - had gone unfilled. In fact, the rephaim had helped to train both full-humans who had stepped into his place. By contrast, the monks at the monastery had raised Belial specifically for the job he and Kristóf had been assigned. He hadn’t had a community in the way Kristóf had.

“We went where the Defense and the Order sent us,” Kristóf replied, just as he had every night so far. 

And just as on all the other nights, Belial shook his head and said calmly, “No. We went where we were needed. Those just happened to be the same place.

“Now,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up too late.”

Some nights it felt like he was reading from a script. They both knew Kristóf was going to stay up far later than he should. He would still be up with the dawn, when Belial got up. They were both so overtrained by now that Kristóf woke at the sound of Belial getting out of his own bed across the room. Though perhaps that was less their training and more parenthood. Kristóf would also wake if Mark or Mary got out of bed in the other room. After only a week, Belial was starting to notice those sounds too. 

What he knew for certain, though, was that they were in the right place. He had spent weeks praying on the matter, and though he sometimes questioned the idea of a God-guided fate, this felt right. From the time their respective Churches had dedicated them to this job and to each other in that work, they had lived on separate sides of the world. Belial in Jerusalem, not more than half a day on horseback from his people, and Kristóf in Sugar Gap, located in the middle of nowhere in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, where the man who had raised him had felt he stood a chance of being safe. 

After everything - after Valeri and the inevitable self-doubt he had awoken in Belial, after losing several of their own to the psychotic nephilim - it felt right that they were all here together. An odd, little, makeshift family. So while Kristóf might still be working it all out in his head and in his heart, Belial was at peace. And he could accept that it might take Kristóf some time. He could accept that the twins didn’t understand and may never understand. Despite everything, they were all together now, and any doubts that any of them had about their places in life could be more easily assuaged. Perhaps Belial didn’t believe that everything was part of a fate designed by the Almighty Himself, but this? This felt like divine intervention if ever there had been such a thing. And they could all use a bit of that right now.

**Author's Note:**

> These guys come from an unfinished novel I've set aside for the time being. As such, there are references to things from the novel. If anything's confusing, please let me know. Obviously, I already know all of this, so what seems straightforward and well explained to me might be confusing to someone not in my brain or familiar with my in-progress work.
> 
> Additionally, the author is not a religious person and walked away from the Church more than a decade and a half ago. I'm not intending to step on anybody's feet here, but working with a structure similar to what I was raised with (I was raised Protestant) seemed to work best when I was developing this whole thing. And I know that I am far from the first writer to just sort of treat Catholicism as a sandbox.


End file.
